Your Clients Are Turning to Yelp to Read Online Reviews and Find a Lawyer

Are you a lawyer or a legal professional working at a law firm? Here’s an interesting finding from a study by Software Advice: Yelp is the most popular and most trusted website for lawyer reviews and attorney reviews.

This means that your existing and potential clients are sharing, reading, and searching for information on Yelp – and making their decisions based on what they find. In fact, 58 percent of the surveyed individuals say that they would turn first to Jeremy Stoppelman’s baby to find or research a lawyer; meanwhile 68 percent say that Yelp is the lawyer review site that they find most trustworthy.

So, if you’re a lawyer, make sure that your Yelp profile – as well as your profile on every relevant lawyer review site – has been claimed and is filled out with accurate, up-to-date information; otherwise, you may be missing out on new business from a significant number of potential clients. It’s also going to be extremely critical for your business to track Yelp reviews.

According to the same study, reading and monitoring lawyer reviews is the first step to finding an attorney for 83 percent of the respondents.

Here are other highlights from Software Advice’s research:

Only 9 percent of clients use online reviews to evaluate a lawyer they have already retained. Meanwhile, 8 percent check reviews of the lawyers they have tentatively selected in order to validate their decisions.

Quality of service and years of legal experience (48 percent)are the two most important types of information for clients whenever they’re reading online reviews of lawyers and law firms. 38 percent also cited the lawyer’s overall / aggregated rating as important information.

70 percent of clients are willing to commute – meaning, they would consider going to an attorney in an inconvenient part of town – if the said attorney had better reviews and higher ratings than similar legal professionals closer to home.

“Having a powerful presence on legal reviews sites can help you attract new clients,” wroteChantelle Wallace,Software Advice Managing Editor. “An effective way to increase your online review presence is to ask current clients to leave reviews for you. Consider asking clients to leave a review after you’ve had a positive in-person consultation with them, or after their case has been favorably settled.”

Migs Bassig

Migs is the Content Manager for ReviewTrackers. He's a creative writer who has helped numerous companies communicate more effectively online, and he loves sharing his local marketing knowledge to help brands and business succeed.

Discussion

AurorMine

August 31st, 2015

Yelp is favoring well established lawyers and companies, while the new law firms are not getting any attention at all. If you are establishing a new law office, then you probably should skip Yelp and other review platforms as they are useless for your start up.